A Revival of Little Black Sambo in Japan

Kazuo Mori

Institute of Engeneering, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Koganei, Tokyo, Japan.

DOI: 10.4236/als.2014.21003                

Abstract

In the late 1980s, a popular children’s book “Little Black Sambo”(hereafter,LBS) disappeared from all bookstores in Japan.The book was alleged to have racist characteristics such as the name of the boy, the way the illustrations caricatured blacks, etc. Mori (1997) revised the original story by changing the protagonist from a black boy to a black Labrador puppy, with eliminating the word “Sambo”,which had a historically pejorative connotation in the US. Mori (2005) conducted an experiment to compare the entertainment value of the two versions of LBS using four-year-old children and found no difference. Mori (2005) also casted a suspicion that the real reason why the book was withdrawnin Japan was a matter of piracy rather than racism. All Japanese publishers at that time had not properly obtained the copyright. Nowadays there are several versions of LBS available in bookstores all over Japan.

Keywords

Helen Bannerman; The Story of Little Black Sambo; Japanese Translation; Racial Discrimination

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

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[2]	Mori, K. (2005a). A comparison of amusingness for Japanese children and senior citizens of The Story of Little Black Sambo in the traditional version and nonracist version. Social Behavior and Personality, 33, 455-466. http://dx.doi.org/10.2224/sbp.2005.33.5.455
[3]	Mori, K. (2005b). What have we learned from Chibikuro Sambo? Metropolis, 610, 58.
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[5]	Mori, M. (1997). Chibikuro Sampo. Kitaooji Shobo Publishing (A non- racist version of the Story of Little Black Sambo in Japanese with the translation arrangement between Kitaooji Shobo and Rugged Bears, the legal copyright holder of the book in UK).